


Of Our Lost Kingdoms

by MidnightLeo



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Gen, Keyblade Graveyard (Kingdom Hearts), Keyblade War (Kingdom Hearts), Keyblade War Aftermath (Kingdom Hearts), POV Second Person, local keykid has Bad Time, mass offscreen character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-05
Updated: 2019-08-05
Packaged: 2020-08-10 03:27:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20128591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MidnightLeo/pseuds/MidnightLeo
Summary: Someone has to put them to rest somehow, and these bodies aren't going to move themselves.As penance for surviving in the face of this, it may as well be you.





	Of Our Lost Kingdoms

When you open your eyes at last, it's all over. Whoever or whatever knocked you out did a thorough job, enough to have saved your life. 

Those around you were not as lucky.

You'd never seen a keyblade used against a person before this day. The keyblade had always felt less like a weapon and more like a living tool to you before. You can't unsee the damage it's capable of now.

The battlefield (could it still be called that if it wasn't a battle but a two sided massacre with only losers?) is all over corpses and dead metal, so much blood spilled that the color of the sand is different. Had you awoken any earlier it would have been mud, but the sun has dutifully baked it back to rust. You can almost pretend the blood was never there, but you can't in the face of all this death. 

You're the only one standing. You feel sick, but from far away. This is all happening to someone else and you are unfortunate enough to be seeing it with them. Why are they all still lying there? They deserve their last rites. Someone needs to put them to rest. Someone has to clean up this tragedy.

You're still woozy, but someone needs to do it and you're not seeing any other volunteers so you muster up what little stubbornness you have left, cast a piddly little Cure on yourself to keep you upright, and get to work. Your Chirithy dogs your heels silently, face unreadable but not abandoning you to face this alone at least. Whenever you stop for a moment, whether to rest or choke back bile, you can feel their little paw rest against your leg as though to steady themself or ground you or both. Whatever the intention, the gentle gesture is all too welcome in the face of your hellish task. 

Someone has to put them to rest somehow, and these bodies aren't going to move themselves. 

As penance for surviving in the face of this, it may as well be you.

\----

You do your best to not look at their faces, to unfocus your vision enough that you can't make out the details of their clothes and hope that it is enough to save you from knowing, that not knowing will save your mind from the horror of this when the veil finally lifts. If there is a familiar face in the unreadable blur of this hellscape, you pray you never see it. 

You do your best to be gentle, to be respectful, but the dead can't appreciate your efforts anymore and you are so small in the face of the enormity of this task. You save your strength where you can and wonder idly if it will be enough.

Ally and foe alike--pitiful, blinded fools all--go into the pile together undifferentiated. Death didn't discriminate so neither will you, not that you would even be able to distinguish them at this point. 

You don't have the energy left either way. 

Your side bleeds sluggishly, you tore the wound back open during all your carrying and dragging, and you listlessly Cure it shut again. It's sloppy work you'll likely be paying for later but you can't bring yourself to care too much in the face of everything else. Your arms ache, you've never carried anything much heavier than your keyblade before and you are unprepared for the incredible strain but you've started this and you are going to see this through to the very end. 

You are both pallbearer and undertaker, and you will close this chapter no matter how long it takes you.

\----

Your feet hurt from walking back and forth across the endless lengths of the desert, almost like you would find blood if you tipped out your boots. 

You keep walking.

\----

If there are any other survivors, they didn't bother to stick around and you almost wish you could blame them for it. There's nothing left for them here but lifeless metal and blood, and there will be nothing left for you either when you finish your grisly work. This world is good for nothing but a grave now, and you won't be able to give it the grave it deserves. The best you can do is a funeral pyre, but in some ways it's better like this. Should the setting of so much pointless bloodshed (and you do see it was pointless now, much, much too late) have a grand monument to its name, or is it better left unremarked on? Do the lives lost deserve an unmarked grave of a world, or should they be commemorated somehow, a warning to future wielders?

Bitterly, you wonder if anyone else made it out so that there could be future wielders to warn. 

Something about the idea of leaving it blank, of simply letting the ashes seep into the sand and being done with it, irks you. An emotion is slowly filtering through the numbness and nausea, something defiant and angry that slowly builds into a thundering crescendo in your chest to consume everything else rattling around in your brain. 

The future deserves to know that you were here, that a tragedy took place here that was so overwhelming that you lack the vocabulary to even approximate its shape. Be it cautionary tale or commemoration, you are going to put something here to show for all the blood spilled on these sands. You gulp down your last ether and set the makeshift pyre ablaze, the fire burning hotter than you've ever managed in your life, before turning your back on it. 

You trust your Chirithy to keep an eye on it; you don't even need to speak the words before they're already nodding in acquiescence, face illuminated in flame. 

You have another task that needs your attention now. 

You start walking.

\----

The crust of blood on your hands cracks when you grab the handle of the first keyblade, abandoned in death with no-one left to inherit it. It doesn't fight you, almost like it can sense your intentions, and you stab it into the ground upright, a tombstone with no grave to mark. The next one comes just as strangely easily, and so does the one after that, and soon you have a neat row of them. 

A picture is forming in your mind now, the careful aisles you remember from the graveyard in Daybreak Town extrapolated on a worldwide scale, a walkway in four directions so that visitors don't need to weave their way through the sea of keyblades.

Goal established, you shake the flakes of blood from your hands and keep moving.

\----

You can feel the exhaustion finally getting to you on the fifth day, the sun's unforgiving rays hastening along the end of your determination and horror soaked adrenaline. Your careful walkway was achieved but _Light preserve you there are still so many keyblades left._ You get sloppy, the intervals less uniform, the farther away from the entrances you get the more haphazard the shape of the field feels, and you wonder if there will never be an end to this. 

Your Chirithy has been bringing you water without you asking; the two of you haven't spoken a word to each other since before the war. Words have no place here anymore. The solemnity of this place is a tangible, choking thing. 

You can't help but feel that you almost had it easier with the funeral pyre. So many of your fellow wielders were vaporized with magic or disappeared when their hearts were inadvertently rent from their bodies, but it seems as though every keyblade present that day has remained.

Every one plunged into the hard earth takes something from you that you know you'll never get back. 

You can't find it in yourself to care about the loss.

\----

When there are no keyblades left to place, you climb one of the towering canyon walls on shaking legs to survey your work. You can't make out individual keyblades from this vantage point, but the shape and its deliberate nature are undeniable even from a distance. Some of the tension bleeds out of your shoulders; any stranger who finds this place will see this and know that at least one person cared. 

You want to say something, anything. Something to draw a line between the then and this moment now. The sound catches in your throat like its been blocked and you don’t try again.

You pick up your Chirithy with your (carefully cleaned) hands and turn to leave at last.

There are no words left in you to offer now that the work is finally done, no eulogy can be forced past your lips, so you make this world an elegy instead and pray that it is enough.

**Author's Note:**

> Look, I know in KHUX the scene they show directly after the main fight of the Keyblade War, the keyblades are already stuck in the ground like their wielders stabbed them into the ground as they were dying I guess. I'm ignoring that because it doesn't make sense to me.  
There was always something very deliberate seeming about the Keyblade Graveyard to me, like those perfect aisles? The keyblades stabbed into the ground in almost regular intervals? Someone or several someones took the time to do that, to commemorate the fallen in a way that reads for both those who wield the keyblade and those who do not. A memorial to the lives lost and a warning to not let it happen again for those that truly understand what they're looking at.  
I wanted to try and portray the idea of a lone survivor creating the Graveyard out of the Badlands, so naturally it possessed my hands at 3am and now we have this. I attempted to do research on how death works in Kingdom Hearts but I'm not entirely sure there's anyone who knows definitively at this point so
> 
> The narrator mentions the amount of death a lot, but I don't go into very vivid detail for the most part, so I did my best to tag this but be forewarned anyways. Title is from T.S Eliot's "The Hollow Men".


End file.
